Python tarfile module overwrites existing files during extraction - how to disable it?

Question

Is there a way prevent tarfile.extractall (API) from overwriting existing files? By "prevent" I mean ideally raising an exception when an overwrite is about to happen. The current behavior is to silently overwrite the files.

Answer 1

You could check result of tarfile.getnames against the existing files and raise your error.

Answer 2

Have you tried setting tarfile.errorlevel to 2? That will cause non-fatal errors to be raised. I'm assuming an overwrite falls in that category.